Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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Headteachers were once stern and authoritative. Now they're blubbering wrecks who complain about being 'bullied' by nasty Gove

What has gone wrong with headteachers? My old head was a nun so severe she could reduce you to a puddle of pitiful inadequacy with one withering look. Her office was always full of girls scrubbing make-up from their faces with dry paper towels. My Doctor Marten boots sat in that office for months (apparently they weren't appropriate schoolwear). Yet now, if the NAHT conference at the weekend is anything to go by, it seems headteachers are the ones who can be turned into blubbering wrecks upon receiving the mildest of rebukes or any bit of pressure from on high. Headteachers now behave like the soppiest of self-pitying school pupils, narcissistically moaning about how hard and unfair life is.

The outpouring of woe-is-us at the conference of the National Association of Headteachers was a truly sad sight. In their heckling of education secretary Michael Gove, the assembled teachers and heads weren't behaving like grizzled, Seventies-style hardnut trade unionists, as some observers claimed, but rather like nerds expressing a teary-eyed primal fury with the big kid who's been bullying them. One headteacher said the worry of Ofsted inspections made her feel like she was living under a culture of “bullying and fear”. Another claimed that one of her most trusted school governors had “dissolved into tears” after a week in which her school had undergone both Sats tests and an Ofsted visit. I’m sorry, but if you crumble and weep upon being asked to do two things that are essential to a decent education system – testing your kids’ intellectual achievements and having your school tested by the overseers of educational standards – then you really shouldn’t be working in a school.

Like the skinny, anaemic kid in the corner of the playground, teachers and their representatives are forever depicting themselves as victims of Gove’s “bullying”. Trade unions accuse Gove of “bullying teachers”. When Gove suggested having longer school days and shorter holiday periods, union officials accused him of wielding a “bully’s charter” – that is, he was apparently “bullying teachers” into doing more work. His suggestion that it should be easier for schools to sack bad teachers was described by one union spokesperson as a “licence for bullying”, which might be used to endorse “management bullying in schools”. It seems teachers have so thoroughly imbibed the anti-bullying ethos that is now rife in British schools, and which ridiculously depicts every minor spat and slight between kids as “bullying”, that they look upon all tense relationships or pressured demands, even those between adults, as another nasty case of bullyboy tactics. They depict Gove as Bully Beef and themselves as the poor, put-upon Chips.

The attack on Gove for being a bully who is putting schools under pressure and stress really reveals what lies behind the anti-Gove outlook that’s so widespread in chattering-class circles: a conviction that state schools and their vulnerable little teachers and students should be insulated from the pressures of testing and tough demands. In other words, state schools should be chilled-out places where no one is ever thoroughly examined. This is a PC spin on the old snobbish belief that we shouldn’t expect too much of the grubby-kneed urchins or daughters of receptionists who attend state schools because they don’t come from intellectually inclined backgrounds. Don’t “stress them out” or “bully them” with hard questions and Sats and rigorous intellectual training – that’s the message coming from those who, heaven forfend, are now in charge of the next generation's intellectual welfare.

In any profession, the self-infantilisation currently gone in for by teachers and headteachers, the shameless adoption of the tag of childlike victim of bullies in Whitehall, would be embarrassing. But in a profession that relies for its effectiveness on the exercise of adult authority over children, on the idea that grown-ups are clever and robust and should be respected, it is potentially disastrous. How can teachers ever again be authoritative in the classroom, or put pressure on their kids to succeed, when they have very publicly depicted themselves as wimps who are scared of Whitehall’s bullies, and when they have pushed forward the super-philistine argument that to have high expectations of people is a kind of bullying that should be punished and ideally outlawed?